Verve Poetry Press – förlag

It seems like Casey Bailey has been adjusting all his life. Adapting to the harsh realities of his Nechells upbringing – the drugs, the weapons, the lost friends, the lost hope. Finding ways to assimilate and swallow injustices and ways of being treated that no-one should have to tolerate. Finding a way to make meaning of his life – a way to contribute.

And to some extent, he succeeded. He made the moves he needed to make and began to find his place. And then 2017 happened – when within a year he lost his mother and became a father and was forced to deal with extreme loss and joy, pride and pain, as life-sized as they get and all at the same time.

This book is about Casey’s journey, and is an attempt to tell the story of this last tumultuous year, when sky-high highs and lows as low as ocean beds combined to form something else entirely; when a whole new raft of adjustments, bigger than any he’d made before, were asking to happen.

Casey’s poetry is up to the challenge of capturing all this. He has an uncanny ability to make simple poetic statements about things which remain resolutely complex. He can capture the extreme highs and the godawful lows of the life of a young man losing big and gaining large. His poems should break under the weight of the joy they contain and the grief they depict. But they don’t. They look at their subject with the steadfast glare of one who refuses to be beaten and is resolute in his duty and desire to protect those he cares about most.

Casey is a glorious performer, whose words refuse to falter in the face of the wild emotions they seek to communicate. But it is here on the page that the true depth of Casey’s vision comes through. Lows as clear as crystal – highs as detailed and fragile as hearts made of glass.

Casey recently had two videos of his work filmed and broadcast by BBC3, each amassing over 200,000 views on facebook.

Leon Priestnall was something quite rare on the Spoken Word circuit – a romantic, a lost soul, with so few of the right answers and so many of the wrong ones. His poems are full of questions, not solutions, or even a step further back from that – are asking the question of what questions to ask. In his work, he isn’t setting himself up as any kind of answer – he is as wrong as he is right, behaves badly as often as correctly. Often too confused to be able to move – beyond lighting another cigarette, taking another drink, running for the door – or speak. Often trapped inside the circle of his thoughts, which are a riot of possibilities and recriminations, what-ifs and why-nots.

That he is out and trying to engage at all feels like some kind of triumph. And he is out, in the locked throng of weekend bar-life, amidst the shouts and the laughter, the thrum of music, the night-life characters that appear and disappear like ghost-train skeletons, there as large and loud as life, until they are suddenly gone. He is out, trying to join in somehow. Either that or trying to forget.

The other triumph is the language and energy of these hopeful no-hope poems. The lines sparkle like sharpened knives under the reflected light of glitter-balls. From Johnny, the ‘flat out scoundrel rat/ with a scowl, prowling round your council flats,’ to Taxi Girl; ‘a rock n’ roll Marilyn Monroe … waiting for a sunrise myth-busting insomniac,’ – from ‘the narcissistic weight of a post-modern baby Hitler with a twitter’ to Leon himself, wishing he ‘was unhurried, mild, unafraid, perhaps colder, not so wild,’ myriad characters are brought to life with single breath-taking phrases, before the night, still young, but grown oh – so old, takes them off on their way again.

The upshot of all this is a glowing collection of wild and passionate verse, full of rhythm and urgency, from a poet with a glorious way with words. Leon was such an incredible performer – all heart and agitation and countless voices – the worry was always that we would struggle to stick him to the page. This book puts those worries well and truly to bed. Hopefully they won’t ‘wake up the following morning/ next to some pricky pick up artist/ who knew how to seduce his way/ into [their] low self esteem…’

We are very proud of this first and only collection from Leon, who passed on Jan 19 2021 and leaves such a huge hole.

Also including guest poems by Jack Crowe, Bethany Slinn and Scarlett Ward.

Learning that your mind and body have been taken hostage is one thing. Learning how to take them back is another. What if those that are returned are different to the ones that were lost?

Besharam – Nafeesa Hamid’s glorious debut collection – asks this and many other questions. When does a girl become a woman? When does her world allow her to become a woman? And what kind of woman should she be? The answers aren’t readily forthcoming.

As she treads the shifting line between woman and daughter, between Pakistan and the West, between conservative Islam and liberal, Nafeesa has almost had to find a new language to try to communicate the difficulties of her situation. And what a language! At times hard and pointed, at other times wonderfully and colourfully evocative, erupting with femininity, empowerment and rebellion. It is this language that makes Besharam such a pleasure to read in spite of the pain it contains.

This really is a magical first book of poetry.

Besharam contains guest poems from Birmingham poets Mina Mekic, Yasmina Silva and Zeddie

Eighty Four is a new anthology of poetry on the subject of male suicide in aid of CALM (campaign against living miserably). Poems have been donated to the collection by Andrew McMillan, Salena Godden, Anthony Anaxogorou, Katrina Naomi, Ian Patterson, Carrie Etter, Peter Raynard and Joelle Taylor while a submissions window yielded many excellent poems on the subject from both known and hitherto unknown poets we are thrilled to have been made aware of. Curated by poet Helen Calcutt, Eighty-Four showcases human vulnerability in all its forms. From the baby in the bath who knows daddy is gone, to the woman whose father haunts her through the window, here is a diverse collection of voices, delicately speaking the intense difficulties of the human predicament, courageously engaging with the profound impact that male suicide is having on all of us. There’s a glittering strength to this volume, because of the honesty from which its poems have been created, giving this book the truth it was seeking. We hope to shed light on an issue that is cast in shadow, and often shrouded in secrecy and denial. If we don’t talk, we don’t heal, and we don’t change. In Eighty Four, we are talking. Are you listening?

‘Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

In 2016 four friends wrote the book they wish they’d had as 18 year-old women of colour going to study in the elite academic institution of Cambridge University. And what a book! Wonderful, fiery, radical and brave – it uses multiple voices and forms such as memoir, polemic, poetry, critical approaches – to document their experiences as women of colour in an institution that they had each discovered failed to validate or even acknowledge their heritage, their gender, their right to see themselves in their place of study. As a narrative and a testament, this patchwork book has been sewn together with extreme skill and moves through time as it moves through the different threads of its subject, addressing the curriculum, ways of teaching, visiting authors, student society and activism, with anger and energy and incredible readability. This book, its pace, its outrage, tells its truth in a way that is pretty much unputdownable. The experiences in this book rarely get to be heard and as a result they are rarely accepted as real. The book articulates both the feeling and the struggle to articulate the feeling of being in spaces built for others. As such, it is the book that many many more than it’s four authors will want to read, a book that needed to be written and also needed to be published.

Gardosi’s first foray into print. It is also a labour of love. A single poem, performable, readable on the subject of sound, colour and individual pain (physical but also and most notably emotional).Jasmine’s incredible piece helps launch our new Verve Poetry Pamphlet series – ‘Pamphlet of Words’ – in which Spoken Word Poets of note explore the variety of ways performance pieces can be aimed resolutely at the page and yet still fly in performance.

Scarlett Ward is an incredible young West Midlands poet as comfortable on the page as in performance, with a real ear for language and an imagination to match. Her debut collection, created with help and advice from Liz Berrry and others, doesn’t disappoint, as it takes its Insta-concerns (Scarlett has 10k+ followers) of depression, insecurity, mental ill-health and the deep and powerful ache of a love found, and turns them in to quite startling poetry -at times as light as petals, at others as heavy and violent as a hob nail boot. Read, gasp, enjoy.

Postcolonial Banteris Suhaiymah Manzoo-Khan’s debut collection. It features some of her most well-known and widely performed poems as well as some never-seen-before material. Her words are a disruption of comfort, a call to action, a redistribution of knowledge and an outpouring of dissent. Whilst enraged and devastated by the world she finds herself in, in many ways it is also the mundane; hence, whilst political and complex in nature, her poetry is just the ‘banter’ of everyday life for her and others like her. Ranging from critiquing the function of the nation-state and rejecting secularist visions of identity, to reflecting on the difficulty of writing and penning responses to conversations she wishes she’d had; Suhaiymah’s debut collection is ready and raring to enter the world.

Spoz’s poetry in Sometimes Angry is bold and direct and packs a punch. His work oozes life as he mixes sometimes humour and sometimes anger to great effect. His words mean something and have nothing to hide. And they strive to find the way towards something better. Spoz is an incredible performer but his words deserve to be read and savoured and pondered upon. This collection contains both recent and more distant work from a poet who will touch a million hearts and minds.

Hotel is a wonderful debut pamphlet from 2018 Eric Gregory award winning poet Ali Lewis. In short, intricate verse, his poems tackle the complexities of modern relationships and city living with great self-deprecation, not a little light-heartedness, and dashes of the surreal. But there is depth here too. In this connected century, with so many eyes on you, with so many opinions and agendas being made vocal, what is the best way to be, as a partner, a friend, a colleague? And what will happen if you get it wrong? The domestic lives large in these works, whether in rooms and halls offices or in the world beyond.Ali Lewis is a fresh new voice in poetry and is here for the long haul. Read, and you’ll see why.

Big Sexy Lunch is an irreverent, entertaining account of millennial philosophy and relationships. Roxy Dunn's observational wit and reflective self-doubt muse on sex, singledom, and falling in and out of love. There's a directness and an honesty to these poems which humorously scrutinises the conflicts and contradictions of being attached to someone and our ongoing appetite for fulfilment.

In September 2017, Helen Calcutt’s brother Matthew took his own life. He was 40 years old.

‘… the phone rang / and when I answered it / you’d killed / yourself, and that was the start / of you being dead.’

This is the starting point of an astonishing new pamphlet of poems by Helen Calcutt. At times harrowing; at others hopeful – always deeply felt and beautifully realised. These poems display the poise and precision of a poet already at the height of her powers, writing the un-writable, weaving the terrible into something relatable and filled with the light of understanding.

How do we survive the tumultuous presence of grief? How does the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide affect, our identity, our creativity, and our ability to love? How – in a world shattered by incomparable change and severe loss – do we build a life from the wreckage? Because we do.

Somehow, we do.

Anyone who has seen and laughed with Willis the Poet will know that his poetry notebooks contain poems big and small, incidental and even more incidental, rough and smooth and everything in between (incl smoothly rough). The thing they have in common is that they are all hilarious. At least the ones he reads out are. But never before has Willis the Poet permitted his audience to peep inside his most prized poetry trove. A bad idea? Perhaps, but there’s no resisting a top secret poetry notebook!

In her new pamphlet, Latinx Mix, Marina Sánchez, one of the most distinctive poets from the UKs Latinx community, explores her experiences of living in Mexico, Spain and the UK.

Through the arc of Family, Icons and Earth, she writes a profound, rich and well-crafted sequence of poems grappling with displacement, bilingual identity and mixed heritage, challenging cultural icons and affirming her relationship with the planet, rooted in her Native American ancestry.

By turns lyrical, urgent, sensual and subversive, her powerful use of vivid imagery and language both voice the personal and engage the collective.

Place your hand on this book and you will feel the heartbeat of the poems inside.

Marina Sanchez’s poetry is charged with fervour and passion, and deep connection with her Native American, Mexican and Spanish roots – Nahuatl (Aztec) and Spanish tongues entwine to tell their stories, reclaim lost knowledge and celebrate their existence.

‘What if language was a body of water…’ the poet asks. In these urgent and powerful poems Sanchez’s ancestral voices are in full flow, singing praise to life, the maternal, and the elemental. – Cheryl Moskowitz

‘I’m a widower grieving herself. / My stem still living / while all the petals have died; / my body has begun to droop.’

Hannah has taken her regular hospitalization due to serious illness and made it into astonishing poetry. Her world of the hospital is sometimes like a zoo, sometimes like a gallery and sometimes a crowded town square. The wards contain tigers and crows, butterflies – doctors become poets, the dead turn into an art installation, while outside, the trees are plastic – as unchanging as Hannah’s shielding days that ‘drag like a foot.’ But between the pulled curtains of these words the details of real-life amongst the terminally ill are depicted in full colour. A daughter ‘cries neatly in a corner’ while her mourning father spins ‘his wedding band around his finger.’ Nurses fill ‘carrier bags marked ‘patient’s property’,’ while ‘the industrial plastic’ crinkles as a body is lifted from bed to trolley in its bag. The poet’s eye feels unblinking at times – unable but also unwilling to blink. How could it when it has so much to show? These poems are heavy with import, but they are light with the liveliness of art that is beautifully rendered.

‘These are extraordinary poems that contain both humour and grief towards a world that continually dehumanizes disabled people in multiple ways. With startling images, Hannah Hodgson balances anger and love, despair and hope – this is a pamphlet that will leave any reader irrevocably changed.‘ – Kim Moore

'I was lucky enough to be a very small part of the journey towards this book when I did some mentoring work with Sophie, my first return to work as a freelance writer after a long maternity leave. Not only was Sophie extremely patient, I also learned at least as much from her as she did from me. So, Sophie: thank you. Reader: you’re in for a treat.' - from Helen Mort's foreword

these poems were made during five years of eating and living in glaschu, scotland. they should not be taken as reviews – nor should the quality of the poems necessarily be seen to reflect on the quality of any food or place which may bare a similar name, in either a positive or negative light.Food, culture, history, race, food. No-one combines these subjects like Glasgow based, England born, of Hong Kong heritage Sean Wai Keung.

The title of Elaine Beckett’s debut collection suggests a process of unstoppable change. Moments of personal and global crisis are juxtaposed, and examined from different perspectives so that her poems reveal how humanity is in a constant state of flux. This is ambitious work, acute in its commitment to the truth of lived experience. Beckett’s watch-maker’s eye for detail, impeccable ear, and intricate use of poetic form, reveal truths with a compassion that moves her work way beyond the confessional. Arranged in seven short sequences, that spiral round themes of loss, betrayal, delight and re-birth, this is a beautifully wrought collection; at times hard hitting and painful, yet funny and moving, and always surprising.

‘Occasionally a poet comes along pretty much fully formed. That is what I felt when I first read Elaine Beckett’s poems. Not only her voice - brazen, tender, angry and funny - but how it’s held in structures of great poise and resonance.

Absurd and revelatory, sometimes painful, these poems, steeped in a dark, ironic lyricism, are to be read and read again.’

– Greta Stoddart

Debut collection from Faber New Poets 13 author Elaine Beckett, whose Covid related poem Thursday went viral recently after being published in poetry review...Thursday When the dusk comes in as quiet as thisas low as this, as dense as this,! like your whole world has gone back to where it began and you wonder how you got into this mess the kind of mess you cannot see an end to as if it may already have ended very badly and all you can hear is the sound of your own name spoken deep inside your own head, it is probably best to step back from whatever kind of brink you imagine you have reached and think about something else, something small and practical like boiling an egg.

Metamorphosis is ‘feeding us to the years we are not yet ready for’, the healing years. A transcendence through abuse which is both about human connection and a connection to nature. Influenced by Plath and spoken word, Charlotte explores her repressed childhood, mental health illness and the journey to recovery.

‘Rocksong is a shamelessly baroque ride through the all nadirs and summits of the contemporary queer. It's a decadent book, where decadence isn't a cipher for self-indulgence, but a fierce and fugitive resistance. As Audre Lorde writes 'We survived and survival breeds desire for more self'. Or, in the glowing neon precincts of Rocksong, more selves, plural. These poems flirt and confront in turns, they seduce and attack, they are tender and grotesque. They create a strangely exultant burlesque on identity, sexuality, desire and language. I love them for that.’ Fran Lock

Taking inspiration from the transient states of water, and the parallels of human sentiment, the debut collection from Emily Rose Galvin explores the changing states of emotion, relationships, mental health and cultural pressures. From the vapour-like intangibility of first love to the waves of depression, the dew point aims to examine that finite degree between happiness and desolation; emptiness and making ourselves whole.

At times both vulnerable and shocking, Emily’s writing strikes a nerve between the subtle and uncomfortable, while coaxing out the honest core of readers and forcing them to engage with the darker parts of modern life that we tend to gloss over.

Jo Morris Dixon’s debut pamphlet I told you everything reveals how poetry can function as a holding place for difficult experiences and emotions. Through language at once vivid and straightforward, Dixon skilfully addresses coming-of-age themes which are often left unexplored, even in therapy rooms. There is a keen attentiveness to form in these startling poems, ranging from the sonnet to the Golden Shovel. Urgent, complex and searingly honest, I told you everything is a fierce addition to poetry and queer writing in the UK.

Into Eros is about recovery after sexual violence. Anne Carson’s assertion that Eros is “the biggest risk of your life” takes on a new meaning within legacies of trauma, and on a quest to rediscover desire and healing. This chapbook might help survivors, by offering a complex view of life after violence which includes both difficulty and joy.

“Brigley bravely confronts what it is to be a woman in a world that sees women as prey” - Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod & Good Bones

A defiant splatterpunk body horror on the Inneracy of theological doctrine, in the context of recovery, addiction, death & grieving. A kind of reverent aching. A glorious descent into havok & profanity.

Exploring what god is to an addict, The Bible II is a gory, surreal How-Not-To-Guide for alcoholics coming to terms with their own saviour complex in absence of traditional methods of recovery.

Saints, Apostles, Whales & all things Holy are warped, re-examined, chewed & appropriated into something more fitting for the modern climate. Pianos erupt through bodies & through half remembered or halfway forgotten conversations; people become buildings & their dereliction;everyone is scarred & replete with teeth but everyone is worthy of Redemption it just depends how. Mixing violent, aching prose with experimental forms, the grotesque & sublime play off each other in tangible ways that makes the apocalypse both personal & revelatory. Owing as much to Giallo films as it does to Hardcore Punk Bands like Orchid & Circle Takes The Square as well as the wildness of poets like Fran Lock, Daniel Borzutzky & Joelle Taylor this unsettling mediation grows to a crescendo of hope, if you've the temerity to reach out & grab it.

Exploring how culpability is dealt with in regards to making amends to the ghosts of past lives, whilst living through a mass extinction event of our own making. despite the gallows humour & frank brutality moments of tenderness shine in amongst the maelstrom of words that translates Sam’s frenetic explosive performance style to the page. The poems bleed into each other reframing narratives held up as gospel with the context of perspective as each page turns creating new understanding.

The world is ending but if you need something a little more holy to guide your soul wherever you think you are heading this might be it.

Love The Sinner is the second collection from poet and theatre-maker, Imogen Stirling.

___ sirens, shutters, smashed glass and traffic hums itchy feet twitching thumbs the city thrums with unrest turns a buzz of thought The seven deadly sins are alive and kicking hard in contemporary Scotland. Swooping from the mundane to the immense, Stirling’s long-form poetry weaves narratives of human experience. A loose alliance of extraordinary and unextraordinary characters struggle to comprehend their identities in a world bladed with criticism and obsessed with self-betterment. This story sees ancient roots clasp hands with modern compassion to explore human frailty, love and resilience. Mirror and rallying cry both, Love The Sinner reflects on the meaning of being human today.

Originally from Brighton, Elle has lived in London for the last 12 years. After dabbling in various poetry nights across the UK, she won the Genesis Slam in 2019 and is going ahead to the Hammer and Tongue National Finals at The Royal Albert Hall that was slated to take place last year. In 2019 she also performed as Boiler House London’s International Women’s Day Poet. After winning the Imperial College Nature Slam in 2020 with her piece FOR FREDDY, she was then the International Women’s Day poet for Imperial College London in their 2021 celebrations, running a bespoke workshop for doctors, mathematicians and scientists.

Her debut play HoneyBEE, a spoken word solo show, received 5 star reviews, sold out at the Brighton fringe and VAULT Festival, and won both the Three Weeks Editor’s Award and Best Newcomer from The Scotsman in Edinburgh. She wrote and recorded an original piece of poetry for 'Experimental Words' collaborating with Scientist Sam Gallivan launching in June 2021, and also recently recorded her second spoken word solo show MEAT, collaborating with musicians and sound designers Porscha Present and Emer Dineen. The audio recording will be released as part of Flugelman Productions’ 6-part podcast series of plays Make Me in Summer 2021.

Elle has had several pieces published by Dear Damsels, and was last year longlisted for the Pentabus Writer-in-Residence. She has been featured on Tyrone Lewis’ Spoken Word channel Process Productions and regularly records with MuddyFeet poetry. Her favourite poets producing the works most dog-eared and well loved on her bookshelf are Ocean Vuong, Polarbear, Cecilia Knapp, Caleb Femi, Kae Tempest, and Vanessa Kissule.

She facilitates poetry and performance, direct, and mentors at several establishments in London including charity and community theatre YATI (Young Actors Theatre Islington), East 15 Acting School, and for Mountview Drama school has been commissioned to write various new pieces of Spoken Word for Generation X, an outreach project designed to engage with groups of teenagers in the Peckham Community entitled My Generation.

Maladaptive is Elle's first collection of Poetry.

Kat thought they were far too young to worry about menopause. Biology had other ideas... Dry Season is a spoken word theatre show that interweaves music, movement and medical texts with original poetry and animation. Using the role of women in fairytales as a starting point, Kat takes the audience on a journey through a chaotic year of hormone issues, NHS visits and unexpected connections. Honest, intimate and threaded through with dark humour, Dry Season uses Kat's experience of premature ovarian failure to question societal expectations of age and gender, and explore wider issues around mental health, identity and how we cope with loss.